Amazon Takes On Airspace

By Matt Pillar, chief editor

Given an inch by the FAA, Amazon is now asking for a few hundred feet.

In an uncharacteristically quick and progressive ruling earlier this year, the FAA gave Amazon heavily restricted permission to test Prime Air, the e-commerce juggernaut’s fledgling drone-based delivery service model. That was a significant win for Amazon, and it served to persuade skeptics—myself included—that the e-tailer’s ambitious vision wasn’t so far-fetched. Amazon’s heavy investment in the project, which includes a former NASA astronaut and a former Boeing engineer on the payroll, is enough to quell suspicions that Prime Air is a PR stunt.

Now, just a few months after the FAA gave that inch, Amazon has doubled down on its ask. In perhaps the most ambitious step toward proving the feasibility of 30-minute delivery via drone yet, it’s asking for airspace. In fact, Amazon is proposing a wholesale remodel of airspace as we know it.

The company released a positioning paper on Tuesday that proposes a reservation of the airspace between 200 feet and 400 feet off the ground for highly automated commercial drones. It proposes another 100 feet of airspace above 400 feet be declared a no-fly zone to segregate drones from the some 85,000 manned commercial, private, and cargo planes that traverse U.S. skies each day.

Gur Kimchi, VP and co-founder of Amazon’s Prime Air, anticipates that within then years, hundreds of thousands of drones will be utilizing this airspace, many of them Prime Air delivery drones flying at speeds up to 55 miles per hour to deliver sub-five-pound payloads to consumers. To manage all that air traffic, Amazon piles even more disruption onto its proposal. It posits that as small unmanned aircraft systems rapidly proliferate and quickly dwarf the volume of daily manned flights, the human-dependent air traffic control system we know today will break and fail. The company proposes the establishment of a highly automated air navigation service provider to support high-volume sUAS operations. Put simply, Amazon would like to reconfigure conventional airspace rules and remodel air traffic control as we know it.

It’s an incredibly aggressive proposal, but Amazon is motivated. Its current fulfillment model is massively inefficient, particularly so considering that 85+ percent of the packages it delivers weigh five pounds or less. But in its new positioning statements, the company seems to recognize that wholesale change to the U.S. aviation infrastructure can’t be achieved for the benefit of a single industry, much less a single business entity. With its new proposals, the company is taking a more inclusive position on the advance of commercial drones, calling on the FAA, academia, NASA, commercial, and recreational stakeholders to join the movement.

While Amazon has put some serious skin in the game—and earned a surprisingly quick win with the FAA earlier this year—its biggest tests are yet to come. The company faces some formidable obstacles on the path to populating urban skies with hundreds of thousands of unmanned drones within the decade. However, in light of their incredibly aggressive movement toward the Prime Air vision, it can’t be denied that Jeff Bezos, Kimchi, and the Prime Air team at Amazon are among the most disruptive innovators of our time.